Personal blog

Service Workers are coming to Safari

Service Workers are coming to Safari, it seems. This is my most anticipated and waited web platform feature (or whatever). Really. I’ve known the technology, played with it and deployed it into production on two web apps but it has always irritated me to not have it available for all users. Of course, the platform being what it is, you can never expect all users to have all the bells and whistles in their browsers, but still. Safari lacking behind Chrome, Firefox and Edge has been a painpoint since my user base has 30 % iOS coverage.

This is really great.

If you are a modern web developer or interested in these sorts of things but don’t know about Service Workers, now is a good time to dig into them. I suggest you read Google’s Web Fundamentals series’ introduction post, check out the videos and slides and play with some code on the ServiceWorker Cookbook.

Very simply put, SW is a JavaScript script that runs in the browser between the external network and the usual browser JS land; it can intercept web requests for caching (not the usual HTTP cache in the browser) and offline-serving, make push notifications, sync in the background and enable offline capabilities. It’s completely based on the script logic the developer writes so it can leverage all these things in any manner imaginable. It’s wicked. And this is just for the starters.